I have never found a client that says we don’t need evidence, or data, or facts, or hard measures. Most of the professions I have encountered in those companies claim that territory.
Accountants are quick to tell you that they live for and with numbers and hard data. Clinicians and doctors say they are evidence-based. Engineers claim to have a rational mind and request the numbers. Commercial people need, they say, the numbers. No numbers, no measure; no measure no management. Give me the numbers! Make the numbers! Scientific R&D people would tell you upfront they don’t navigate on soft stuff so they need data, evidence, hard measures, all of the above and well designed processes. They don’t get the soft stuff.
Accountants think that they are the ones pure data driven, not like doctors and others. R&D people think they are the only ones like that, not like their colleagues in Commercial. And in pharmaceutical R&D (where I served my time for years), they claim the ‘truth of things’, not like Commercial or the medics. OK, accountants do as well, they say, but this is because of their brains not having imagination. Everybody reclaims the uniqueness of the rational based on hard data and evidence.
You would have thought that we have a professional zoo of Defenders of the Real Data, Hard facts and Evidence Based world. Not defenders, sorry, that is nothing, real practitioners, 24/7.
In this area, organizations are run on a Colossal Attribution Bias operating system. It may be just me, restless and ranting mind, progressively less tolerant to BS, but, over the years, I have found lots and lots and lots of accountants, R&D heads, Commercial Die Hard people, clinicians, medics and engineers who were incredibly sloppy, ready to cut corners, full of confirmation bias (seen the world as one wants to see it), economical with the truth, compromises of quality and, in general, not that hard-data-junkies. At all. In fact they were worse than other professions not claiming the territory.
Next time I’ll hear a client say, you see, Leandro, here we work on evidence, I will say, me too, show me yours first and nobody will get hurt.